I had a conversation today where I was discussing strategies for content architecture with a Fortune 100 high tech company. The person I was speaking with stated that they wanted to create a strategy where the content was completely independent of the tool set used to create and process it.

I believe his premise was that by making the content tool agnostic, that it enables independence from tools, and allows different parts of the organization to choose different tool sets independently to meet their specific requirements. Provided all the tools can magically inter-operate and just load and save the content in the same model everything will be wonderful.

So my question is. Is this really feasible, or is it just a flight of fancy?

My opinion is that if you are focused on satisfying the actual business requirements of users who are authoring, managing, translating, and publishing that content you cannot practically separate the tools from the content because the requirements themselves are not satisfied by either the content model or the tools, but the combination of both.

This is why you never see this type of separation in other software categories like CRM, Financials, or ERP.

If your organization was looking for a new CRM, would they design an independent data model and strategy around managing client information, then find tools that will use the model? I doubt it.

Instead they would most likely gather their business requirements, which by definition need to be independent of implementation, then go to the market with an RFI or RFP. This enables them to consider all the possible ways and technologies available to solve their problems.

I would love to hear your opinions and feedback on this subject.

Paul Trotter
Founder and CEO
Author-it Software Corporation

A couple of weeks ago Author-it announced a new partnership with Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: LIOX) the world’s leading translation and localization service provider.

The same week I attended the Localization World conference in Santa Clara, CA and had the opportunity to speak with many clients, partners, and analysts about the partnership. The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

While many can see the huge advantages in Author-it working together with Lionbridge to optimize the localization process for common clients, it was less clear what value this partnership would bring to the market at large.

For those of you familiar with the localization marketplace and technology, it has been clear for some time that the efficiencies realized by Translation Memory technologies, which were considerable, are now reaching their limits. In these lean times, organizations are now looking for the next leap in efficiency.

Some think this will come from managing and automating the localization workflow. I am convinced that while this may provide some improvements, they will not be significant, and will be largely due to the inefficient way in which people currently create and manage the source content.

I believe real efficiencies come from looking upstream to the point of content creation. The objective here should be to improve the consistency and reuse of content. This focus reduces the number of words requiring translation with obvious downstream savings in localization costs. The Nirvana in this process is achieved by fully integrating the authoring and translation process into a seamless end-to-end solution. By doing this, we eliminate the need for a separate localization workflow and automate the publishing process, thereby eliminating costly post translation Desktop Publishing.

We regularly see our clients exceed 70% content reuse across their publications, which corresponds directly to the word count needing translation. Just last week I read a presentation from HP where they have achieved 82-90% reuse on their various User Guides for Enterprise Servers using Author-it. Not only do they get the reduction on translation cost, but similar reductions in internal review cycles, and the virtual elimination of DTP, which in many cases represent 30-40% of the entire localization budget. These are significant savings!
So you may be asking now, why would Lionbridge want to partner with Author-it if doing so will reduce the cost of localization so significantly?

Firstly, localization is a competitive market as I am sure you all know – driven by positioning from SDL, organizations are being bombarded with ‘competitive opportunities’ to significantly reduce their overall expenditure.  Players like Moravia and TDC are jumping on the pursuit with strategic partnerships and acquisitions of efficiency producing technology.  Localization is changing fast for better or worse.  Creating intelligent long term alliances with ‘best practice’ solutions like Author-it allows Lionbridge to re-establish market leadership and better compete against the combined solutions of the top 10 localization vendors.

Secondly, the larger reality is that even with significant process efficiency, companies generally do not reduce their spend on localization. Instead, they get more value and more content at the same cost. This means expansion into new markets or localization of more products.  Indeed the localization industry has seen almost 50% growth over the last five years in spite of productivity tools like XML, Translation Memory and Machine Translation technologies reducing bottomline costs.  The business reality is there is just too much content to translate – finding more efficient ways to address this problem opens the translation flood gates.  While a ‘type of work’ shift occurs, it seldomly results in a net loss of revenue.

What the partnership does create for both companies is the visible thought and solution leadership that separates us from the competition, which shows our joint clients that we are innovative and can produce an industry beating efficiency for the complete end-to-end global content cycle.

I am extremely excited about taking our partnership forward, about out-performing our joint competition and about engaging our clients together with a solution offering such significant and compelling ROI.
Feel free to leave me your comments or questions.

Paul Trotter
Founder and CEO
Author-it Software Corporation

Posted by Paul Trotter, Founder and CEO, Author-it Software Corporation

I’ve been working on Author-it beta programs in various roles for 5 years, and have a fairly good idea on how many responses we normally get and also, how many of those responses convert into beta testers.

Imagine my surprise, when I checked my emails after sending out the invitation to participate, to find that more than 4 times the standard number of clients had responded! And not only were they responding, but many of their responses were excited; very excited.

The Author-it Assist beta program started today, with the first step being a brief webinar to show a quick demonstration of Assist and to answer some questions. Again attendance was overwhelming and the questions were coming thick and fast.

Overall, there seems to be an unprecedented level of excitement surrounding Author-it Assist and I can honestly say that I’m not only excited by this new product, but that I’m very happy to be along for the ride!

Posted by Julie Goodwin, Support Lead, Author-it Software Corporation

Tuesday 19th May was Workchoice Day for many year 12 high school students around New Zealand. Workchoice Day is a day Year 12 students (16-17yo) spend cruising through companies with the hope of getting a better understanding about the wonderful world of employment that lies ahead of them.

Author-it Software Corporation signed up to donate its office and its time this year as part of a community service. A fabulous volunteer team, headed by our HR Manager Amanda, put together a fun and informative agenda ready for the arrival of the students.

Macleans College was our first school to visit, with a mixed group of around 15 students. Both Julia (Accounts Assistant) and Richard (Business Development Manager) attended Macleans College back in their school days, so Julia met with the students, giving them a brief overview of what she’d done with her life since leaving Macleans. And afterwards, Richard did a short talk and basic demonstration about Author-it and how it works. An overview of the company and personal employment history was given by the company President Steve, as well as Amanda and Sarah (Reception/Admin Manager). A tour of the offices saw the students interacting with all the staff, asking questions about the various roles that interested them. A group lunch followed, where again the students talked to those whose jobs interested them the most.

After a quick clean-up, our next group arrived, a slightly smaller group of girls from St. Cuthberts College. Although shorter on time than the previous group, Steve, Amanda and Sarah did another company overview and personal working history, and another tour of the offices was given along with more questions (and plenty of giggles).

The students, supervisors and Workchoice Day co-ordinators alike gave us fantastic feedback. They were blown away by our culture and our people. Some of the comments we received, during and after the day: “Has opened my eyes to different careers in finance.” Another student said that what they found most interesting was “The emphasis placed on work culture”. Barbara, the supervisor from St. Cuthberts College, said that “you did convey a very enlightened culture and a happy and supportive workplace.” Since being involved with these schools, Amanda has been invited to speak at a Careers Evening held by St. Cuthberts School. A real credit to her and the efforts she took to make this day a success.

Thank you to all the volunteers, including Steve, Amanda, Richard, Danielle, John and Julia, who took time out of their working day to be with the students. Another big thanks to everyone in the office for being so accommodating with the student’s questions and willingly having your quiet working day interrupted. We look forward to another successful Workchoice Day next year!

Posted by Sarah Smith, Reception/Admin Manager, Author-it Software Corporation

The year 2006 was an exciting year, for all sorts of reasons. It was an exciting year for Author-it Software Corporation when Author-it 4.3 was released with support for the still-embryonic DITA standard. Who knew, in 2006, that DITA would come so far? (Well, we did, obviously.) As Author-it is a controlled authoring tool, built on top of a component content management system, with a multi-channel publishing engine back end, we were pretty much the first end-to-end DITA solution. (After all, end-to-end is such a fluid description. Just because we have more at the starting end (authoring), the finishing end (publishing), and that lumpy bit in the middle (content management), what’s to stop someone else from picking up the pegs and moving them closer together to create their own definition… sigh).

The independent CMS Watch published an industry report in 2008 covering DITA tools, XML, and component content management systems. As one of the few vendors providing a end-to-end DITA solution Author-it rated very highly. High praise indeed. Author-it being an out of the box solution that requires no third party tools or programming certainly helped. Interested in the report? If you are reading this you should be*. 2009 version out soon, I believe.

I don’t want to sound fussy, but first usually means… first. And 2006 is definitely before 2009. So unless I’m missing a very finely tuned definition of ‘First Authoring Software to Support DITA Publishing With No Programming or Third-Party Tools Required’ that somehow magically makes 2009 occur before 2006, I think someone at MadCap is taking liberties with the truth. Now I like Lewis Carroll and George Orwell as much as the next person but such blatant and farcical manipulation of the truth should remain in works of fiction. Or people should hire PR companies that do their homework.

Or, we could agree that MadCap has never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Lovely folks at MadCap, and Flare works very well and lots of people like it, but if no one else is going to call them on the blatantly inaccurate press releases seen over the past year, I will.

Posted by Matthew Armstrong, Sales Director Asia Pacific, Author-it Software Corporation

*From the CMS Watch website:
About the Report
The XML & Component Content Management Report 2009 provides an overview of leading CCM products as well as XML editing tools, including detailed comparative evaluations of 25 CCM vendors XML editing products.
How it will help you
The report can help your team:

• Save time in the selection process
• Create an effective vendor shortlist
• Avoid selecting the wrong product
• Budget more accurately
• Avoid painful setbacks

Who needs this report?
Check out this report if you are considering to undertake any of the following projects:

• Complex content re-use
• Extensive content translation
• Technical Documentation and other DITA projects
• Structuring common office documents
• Multichannel publishing
• Structured authoring with XML editors
• Managing information components at an enterprise level

Last week I travelled to Melbourne to the annual AODC conference. It was good catching up with the technical communicators there and gave me a chance to introduce a new direction that Author-it is moving in – Real Time Performance Support. I gave a talk about the background behind the rise in Real Time Performance Support and outlined how they are being used and to what effect. We have a new product release soon – Author-it Assist, you can read more about this on our latest products page of the website http://www.author-it.com/index.php?page=latestproducts. I see this doing two things for people. Firstly, its a great way to provide contextual help – even in applications made by other people. Secondly these systems are used to create customized support for organizations tying all their applications contextually to their own content repository. We’ve done a lot of research and found that users need a support system in their work place that does several things:

• Integrates directly into applications and provides contextual learning without any need to access the development code or context ID’s
• Provide multiple contextual links from a single page
• Supports informal learning strategies (requiring less investment in formal training and less disruptive peer training)
• That serves up content using ‘just in time’ practice (push and pull the content to the user)
• Provides customized, contextual content that suits ‘how they use it’ not ‘how it works’
• Sends updates to contextual links independently of new software builds

These systems are being used to great success already and are certainly on the rise with the Knowledge Managers. It’s interesting that the technical writer is a big winner as it enables them to do so much more ‘retrofitting’ with their support material.

Do you, as a technical writer, see value in being able to retrofit your material into other applications?

Posted by Richard Ashurst, Business Development Manager, Author-it Software Corporation

Cross the Solent to the Isle of Wight and you may feel as if you have stepped back in time! The Isle of Wight is one of the best kept secrets in the UK when it comes to areas of outstanding natural beauty. If you like sailing, walking and cycling as much as we do then the Isle of Wight is definitely one to put on your list of places to visit. I also have it on good authority that the golf is pretty good too, but I haven’t been bitten by that particular bug just yet!

Martin and I have fallen so much in love with the Island that last summer we bought a property in Cowes, gave it a complete make over and we are now letting it out for sailing regattas and family holidays. For more information have a look at our Regatta Cottage website (created using Author-it of course!).

Posted by Amanda Caley, Director, Content Chameleon, Author-it Certified Consultant”

With a background in education I’ve been interested in a number of blogs and articles that have come up over the past few months regarding ‘open source collaboration’ for instructional material.  Anyone who has used a wiki knows the general idea: ubiquitous, collaborative authoring by motivated experts un-encumbered by geographic location or commercial constraints.  In some areas, though, a wiki is a very poor choice.  Its egalitarian nature, informality and generally more limited formatting becomes the other edge of the sword.  The ‘heat/light’ ratio changes and users lose confidence in the quality of information.
Beyond the hype of open source (Free software!  No vendors!) lies the real beauty – altruism and belief that information should be shared.  There are some amazing projects by universities to enable professors and industry experts to collaborate on curricula for a wide range of disciplines, from electrical engineering through to agriculture husbandry.  A baseline of material was provided and users can contribute, extend and filter to meet their needs.  Schools and universities are then free to incorporate this curricula into their own programmes.
Here at Author-it we have a large community of intelligent users that have taken the core Author-it software and solved some very complex problems.  We get to hear about it but the information often stays locked inside peoples’ heads or drifts around the user community as anecdotes and rumour.  So, in keeping with the spirit of open source we have made the (very purple) ‘Using Author-it’ guide available as an open source project.  Our own product Author-it Live provides the ubiquitous, collaborative authoring interface via a standard web browser, to anyone, anywhere.  With our long experience in the documentation and publishing industry we believe quality and accuracy are critical and shouldn’t be sacrificed just to get web-based collaboration.  Author-it Live’s controlled workflow ensures that all articles go through peer-review before being made ‘live’.
At this early stage a small group of users will be contributing articles, and this community will grow.  The evolving ‘Using Author-it’ guide will be made available online, and for the old school ‘curl up on the couch with a cup of tea’ people, a regular update to the hard copy will be found on Amazon. (update - the ‘Using Author-it’ guide has sold out already, sorry.  More copies on their way to Amazon’s warehouse early next week)

I’d be interested in feedback from readers about the strengths, weaknesses, joys and disappointments of your own open collaborative efforts…
Posted by Matt Armstrong, Sales Director Asia Pacific, Author-it Software Corporation

While we watch the unemployment rate surge, I think we also need to spare a thought for those who are ‘fortunate’ to keep their jobs. In many cases not only are they being asked to accept reduced hours and pay but also to work harder, produce greater results, find cost savings and most importantly generate additional revenue.

But with reduced resources and budget constraints how do you meet these challenges?

Over the past few months we have been addressing this very question with our clients and it has made us think really hard about the ways in which we can help. Over a decade in the market has given us the confidence and experience to know that we can literally double writer productivity, half costs and improve sales efficiency where Author-it is used for sales proposal management. It’s very satisfying to know that these kind of improvements make a large difference in a recessionary market. But having said all of that; even with real ROI evidence, it can be challenging to get budget approval where executive mandates demand large scale cuts.

To meet this challenge head on, we’ve developed two ‘Stimulus’ packages, the Author-it Enterprise Pack and the Author-it Starter Pack. These packages bundle software licenses, support/upgrades and implementation services, including training. They are designed to get companies up and running quickly so that you can start delivering ROI almost immediately. By bundling, we’ve been able to deliver a substantial discount and we are also offering payment plans and subscription pricing options to assist in driving an Author-it initiative through budget approval.

We believe these packages deliver exceptional value and will support your strategies for productivity, cost cutting and sales efficiency. Take a look at the packages here, let us know what you think.

Best,
Steve

Posted by Steve Davis, President, Author-it Software Corporation

Hello, I’m Kendra Carter, an Author-it consultant and trainer here at Author-it Software Corporation. I’ve been an Author-it user for the past nine years now, and I have to say, I am so proud to see how the product continues to grow and expand its content reuse and single sourcing strategies. With the release of 5.2 and structured authoring, clearly Author-it continues to keep up with what’s next in the content management industry.
Speaking of keeping up, how are your Author-it skills? Would you like to learn more about using Author-it . . . for free?!
Attend a free Author-it training at DocTrain West! We’re offering a one-day Author-it basic training post-conference, Friday, March 20, 2009 from 8:30-5:00. This two-part training begins with basic authoring techniques and single-source strategies that make Author-it the leading product for content reuse; it concludes with training on our new, highly anticipated structured authoring option. We’ll talk about best practices for implementing structured authoring on Author-it content. We’ll first put our designer hat on and look at implementing structured templates using the new Author-it Structure Builder. We’ll discuss how to write rules and how to give authors helpful examples and tips on following the rules. Then, we’ll put our author hat on and learn how to create content based on structure rules and what steps to take to verify that content “validates” against these rules. Existing Author-it users—in case you’re wondering, you can impose structure on previously structured content! We’ll talk about how you can implement structured authoring on existing content and helpful tips for doing so.
This training would also be helpful for any existing v4 customers who are wondering whether they should upgrade to Autohr-it 5. You’ll get to see the new interface and it’s many features.
I promise you won’t need to know much about using Author-it before training. Just sit back and watch as I explain and demo basic Author-it functionality. Take the complimentary student materials and exercises home with you to try on your own time. And, feel free to ask any product-related questions as we go.
So, join me for our DocTrain West post-conference training. Be sure to bring your laptop if you would like to follow along. Here’s some more information on the session.
Hope to see you there!
Posted by Kendra Carter, Author-it Senior Consultant, Author-it Software Corporation, kcarter@author-it.com